Thanks for #Timing

Day 20 of the A-Z Blogging Challenge and the letter T.

Thanks for Timing

I’m talking about music and metronomes, and all the players in a band being together and on time.   What does that mean for the singer?  It means the singer needs be on time with the band.   Being on time can make the difference between being able to sing someone else’s song with a group of players and, unrehearsed as a group, sing that song, or not.

Yes, I sing.  I came to singing late in life – well, I sang all the time when I was a kid, but had no musical education and the only musical opportunity was singing WASP hymns in church on Sunday.   I used to lie on the floor on my belly, watching Broadway musicals on TV, and day-dream about being a musical star; then make my dreams come true with a game of dress-up and cabarets presented in the boat houses along the river that ran in front of our house.  At age 8, ‘Moon River‘ was my signature song!

Then the choir master in our church told me I had a low voice for a girl, that girls usually have high voices, and boys have low voices, and I stopped singing.  Afterall, I am a girl.

Ahhhh – woe is me!

Years later the songstress and voice just had to come out, or I thought I would burst.    I was petrified of singing the wrong note (after all I have a low voice for a girl).  My efforts to sing with a group were always hampered by Christmas carol sing-a-longs, or Happy Birthday choruses, led by a soprano.  My low voice didn’t stand a chance.  But the singer inside me would not give up.  She pushed and pushed and pushed – and emerged doing spoken-word poetry with a jazz trio in Budapest, then eventually burst forth, full force, in Barcelona singing punk in dark, back-room bars, with heavy metal players backing me up.  My own poetry improvised to punk – because that way I knew there could be no errors.  It was MY poetry, so nobody could tell me I was doing it wrong!

Successful as a punk-poet, I was invited to sing in fusion jams, rock jams, blues, and now I sing blues, jazz, experimental, and improvisation.

Musicians love to give a singer tips, and the greatest of those is about timing.   Now when I learn a song, I learn the words and the timing together – learning a song’s particular phrasing with a metronome.  One drummer friends says he wishes all singers would do that.

Timing gives players the foundation on which to hang a song.  When the timing works, it’s so much easier to do everything else.  Thanks for timing.

…but I do enjoy a good improvisation set where the timing isn’t fixed and the players are free to roam and ramble and find a different way of coming together. 

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Rigo Utca, Budapest, Hungary

Zrinyi utca (Photo credit: Hat)

The last year I was in HungaryI lived on Rigo, Utca.

Rigo is the Hungarian name for the backbird whose song fills the air in Budapestat dusk and again in the early hours of the morning, even before light starts to show on the horizon.

Fekete Rigo, Hungarian Postage Stamps

I lived in a huge one bedroom flat, on the 3rd floor and my neighbor was the lead singer of a local pop band.  Whenever she learned a new song, I’d learn it, too, whether I wanted to or not!  She played it over and over and the sound would bounce off the building across the street and through the windows into my flat.

It was a musical house and I regularly jammed in my flat with Hungarian musicians.  Zsolt, who played saxophone, was the first to start coming round.  He’d take his shoes and socks off and play a little casio keyboard with his toes, and his saxophone with his mouth and fingers.  I’d ly in the floor, a blanket over my head and make sounds.  We were later joined by a Georgy – a Bulgarianviolinist and flute player who was studying at Lizt Ferenc Music Academy,  and a keyboard player.   We had fun and developed a soundtrack for a long poem of mine, called Hope, which we presented at my leaving party.  I have a recording of it – somewhere – and someday will try to get it uploaded.

I also had a cat at Rigo Utca.  I’d rescued it from the bottom of a deep well that it had fallen into during a snowstorm, and it had followed me home.  Emma was a strange cat.  I think she was part feral and would scream to get out.  If I left the windows open she would walk along the outside ledges, jumping from ledge to ledge and visit the neighbors.  She also chewed through the power cord of my laptop one day when I was on an extended digital art-making binge.  Yes, she shut me down!

I only lived on Rigo Utca for a year, and left in April 2006.  Six months later there were protests in the streets of Budapest against the austerity of the new government, and cars were torched just a few blocks from my flat.

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